Guest Post: Thought’s First Draft

By: | February 28, 2014

chalkboardYou cannot walk more than a dozen paces at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, a cloister of sorts for the more theoretically- and mathematically-inclined of the science community, without happening onto a chalkboard.

Secured on at least one wall of each small office on the building’s two floors is a spacious chalkboard. Chalkboards run across the entire length of the building’s auditorium. At the front of the building’s main lecture hall is a two-tier set of chalkboards, with a sliding mechanism for interchanging the low slabs for the high. Continue reading →

Cable Companies’ Hidden Scam

By: | February 27, 2014

cable boxYour cable company is screwing you. You already knew that, of course. You’ve seen your cable bill. But I want to tell you about a less obvious way that they’re sucking your bank account dry. They’re doing it through the cable box.

I don’t have cable, but I used to. And what I miss most about the service is the box. That box was magic: I could record my favorite shows. I could pause a show midstream and refill my wine glass. I could fast forward through Kia commercials with their creepy gangs of hip hamsters. I could (gasp!) even rewind. It was television viewing at its goddamned finest. I watched what I wanted when I wanted.

Now I get my TV shows via an antenna. And once a moment has passed, it’s gone. There’s no going back. There’s no avoiding the commercials. There’s no watching what I want when I want.

But I recently learned that the box’s magic comes at a price. Those slim little devices are energy guzzlers. Fancy boxes like the one I had, those that deliver HD and allow you to record, consume between 20 and 45 watts, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. The Council estimates that the average household (which has one HD-DVR device and one HD box) uses 446 kilowatt hours of energy each year to power their boxes.  That’s more than an Energy Star refrigerator requires. Why?! My cable box isn’t freezing chicken or chilling beer. What the hell! Continue reading →

Too good to be true: The No-Till Solution

By: | February 26, 2014

 

plowed landIn the late 1960s, when North America was first wising up to pollution, a group of progressive farmers resolved to do their part. Phosphate levels in nearby lakes were promoting blue-green algal blooms, excessively nourishing the cyanobacteria. The blooms consumed oxygen in the lakes, and massive fish kills followed.

While it was easy to blame untreated sewage that spewed into most water bodies in populated areas at the time, there was a clear contribution from fertilizers high in phosphorus. When storms pelted the shoreline farmland, particulate phosphorus would wash down unguarded inclines along with much of the freshly-tilled soil. Erosion wasn’t just bad for the environment, it was costly and bad for crop health.

Along came no-till farming.

Instead of disturbing and opening the earth all over a field until it is vulnerable to erosion, no-till farming only opens ground for the purposes of planting. To make up for the lower absorption capacity of intact ground, farmers line up crop residue to create water channels.

Continue reading →

Death Barged In

By: | February 25, 2014

Pia copy

Pia’s birthday was last week. I didn’t call her or send a card or bake a cake. Such efforts would have fallen on deaf ears, because she died six years ago in January.

Pia was the older sister I’d never had, and she’d welcomed me into her life with apricots and a warm pot of tea. A magnet on her refrigerator door read “sister-in-laws by chance, friends by choice” and I always thought that it referred to us. We were prone to wonky discussions about drinking water and the fate of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. She was finishing a PhD in environmental engineering when cancer intruded on her best-laid plans.

On Christmas, 2007, I flew to California to care for her as she lay dying of cancer. She needed so much and the things I could do felt so small—help her out of bed, place slippers on her swollen feet, prepare fresh dressings for her wound and listen when she felt like talking. Inside, she was still the same person I’d always known, but her body was fading into a ghost of her former self. Nothing could prepare me for the devastation of watching someone I love slowly, painfully, disappear. Months of therapy helped me accept that I did the best I could, but I will never feel that I did enough. Continue reading →

Train of Thought

By: | February 24, 2014

If you’re interested in writingSCENERY, and you’ve been on the internet in the last few days, you may have seen that Amtrak granted a pilot writers’ residency to a New York writer, who took the Lakeshore Limited to Chicago and back, working away in her 3’6” by 6’8” sleeper cabin. And since then, other writers have been weighing in, many with hopes of sign up for the next installment.

What follows is not an application, but an exploration: I’ve only ever been in coach, and if I got a free sleeper berth, I’d want to take my kids. (Or just sleep, uninterrupted.) But I’m fascinated by what makes trains so great for writing. Nearly everywhere I’ve lived has been on an Amtrak line, and every time I’ve traveled by train, I’ve gotten some good work done, whether on the page or just in my mind. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | February 22, 2014

3189655796_401a228e26February 17 – 21

This week, Ann shed light on the connection between the lawn chairs littering wintery Baltimore streets and Lord of the Flies.

If you’ve ever wanted to know what it’s like inside Biosphere 2, Michelle can give you the tour!

Scientists are on a quest to find the Neil Peart of the animal kingdom. Who will win, Erik mused: monkey, cockatoo … or sea lion?

Roberta discovered ancient treasure beneath the gaint construction zone that is Seattle.

And with the line “Life is confusing enough without misleading my brain about what I’m eating“, Helen started a diet soda flamewar! [NB: LWON flamewars are incredibly polite]

Seattle: Land of Amazon, Boeing, and Ancient Mammoths

By: | February 21, 2014

shutterstock_150252941On February 16, 1961, the Seattle Times reported that geologists had dug out the roughly 10,000-year-old bones of a giant sloth from a peat bog near the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Two years later, alongside an article about Boeing’s plans for a supersonic jet and an ad for “Ladies’ Days” bargains on bedspreads and cribs, the newspaper ran a story about 22 mammoth bone fragments and a tooth found at Sixth Avenue and Seneca Street during the excavation for a new building. The foreman, Byron Green, said that he planned to clean the tooth and let his kids take it to school.

Last week, Seattle started buzzing about a new discovery: an 8.5-foot-long Columbian mammoth tusk unearthed by an apartment development company in the South Lake Union district, the city’s epicenter for Amazon workers. The company, AMLI Residential, found the tusk last Tuesday. Luckily, they alerted the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture instead of simply bulldozing through the fossil. Continue reading →

Who Knows What Lurks in the Cans of Soda?

By: | February 20, 2014

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The other day on a flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C., I ordered a ginger ale. The flight attendant asked if I’d like the whole can—the plane had been in line for more than an hour waiting for a slot to take off, so I suppose she was feeling generous—and I accepted. More ginger ale, more happiness.

About halfway through, I noticed that the can proclaimed “25% fewer calories!” What? How does a soda have fewer calories? I turned the can and read the ingredients. And there it was, at the end of the list: sucralose. Continue reading →